Hunter Biden turns his famous laptop scandal into a crypto coin

Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, has launched a cryptocurrency called $LAPTOP. The coin is named after the laptop computer that was at the center of a major political scandal involving him. Biden announced the coin on social media, writing, "They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token." The coin is built on a network called Base and has one billion tokens in total supply.

Biden's move might seem surprising, but he is far from the first person to make money from his own bad reputation. Experts might call this the "infamy premium." That means a person's reputation gets so damaged — and so famous — that the damage itself starts to have real money value. In the digital age, that can happen faster than ever before.

To understand how old this idea really is, consider Jesse James. He was a famous outlaw who was shot dead in 1882. After he died, his own mother charged visitors to tour the family home and sold pebbles from his grave for 25 cents each. When she ran out of pebbles, she grabbed more from a nearby creek and kept selling. His brother Frank later took over and raised the price to 50 cents by 1910.

The man who killed Jesse James, Robert Ford, also tried to profit from the act. He and his brother Charley actually performed the shooting onstage in cities like Kansas City and Chicago. Audiences booed them loudly, but the anger and attention were exactly the point. Even hostility was good for business.

This pattern kept going into the modern era. John Wayne Gacy was a convicted serial killer who spent time on death row before his 1994 execution. While in prison, he made at least 2,000 paintings and sold them through his lawyer and a collector. One painting that originally sold for $50 in 1985 was resold for $12,800 in 2022, nearly 30 years after his death.

What the internet age has changed is how fast all of this can happen. In the past, someone needed to set up a stall, hire a promoter, or find a collector to sell anything. Today, a person can reach millions of people in a single afternoon using just a phone or a laptop. The audience, the store, and the payment system all come in one package online.

A recent example is Shiloh Hendrix. In April 2025, a video went viral showing her using a racial slur against an 8-year-old Black autistic boy at a playground in Rochester, Minnesota. She was widely condemned online but also set up a fundraiser, saying her family had received threats. That fundraiser raised more than $920,000. A separate fundraiser for the boy's family raised more than $340,000, showing that outrage itself drives people to give money.

Biden says his $LAPTOP coin is about reclaiming a symbol that was used against him and his father by political opponents. He frames it as a story of resilience and recovery, not as a financial investment. He has also said clearly that nobody should expect him to make the coin more valuable.

The coin's design is more detailed than most meme coins. Of the one billion tokens, 30 percent goes to founders including Biden, but those tokens are locked for six months and then released slowly over two years. Ten percent is split between a foundation and charity, and 30 percent is tied to 30 specific real-world events. If one of those events happens, that portion of tokens is destroyed; if not, they go to charity.

The coin faced criticism right away, and experts say to watch how many different people hold it once the first month of trading ends. If only a small group holds most of the coins, it looks more like selling fan merchandise than running a real market. The technology behind $LAPTOP is new, but the human desire to buy a piece of someone's notoriety is very old. Americans have been buying souvenirs from scandals for well over a hundred years — and it does not look like that is going to stop anytime soon.